Migratory dynamics and assessment of census requirements on internal and international migration in Mozambique: an analysis based on the 2017 census
Mozambique; Census; Migration; data quality
This research approaches the migratory dynamics and data quality of the census migration measurement requirements in Mozambique. The complexity of the census operation makes it susceptible to errors, especially when the data collection process is in paper format. It was in this perspective that an analysis of the consistency of the questions was carried out in order to assess the quality of the data, which also helped in the definition of the geographical unit cut. There are several factors that influence the migratory dynamics such as socioeconomic, natural disasters. The instability that the country experienced between the 1980s and 1990s provided an environment for the increase of migratory movements in the rural-urban sense and to neighboring countries, especially South Africa and Zimbabwe, the latter combined with the search for opportunities for work due to the historical connection between these countries since the end of the 19th century. In the early 1990s, with the end of the war, it was characterized by a massive return of Mozambicans to their areas of origin after about 16 years. In the early 2000s, the country registered an explosion in economic growth, constituting a factor of attraction for migratory opportunities. and international, and the impact of migration on the dynamics of spatial redistribution of the population of Mozambique. For this purpose, the microdata from the 2017 census are used, descriptive analysis of the migratory phenomenon, sociodemographic characteristics of migrants and their selectivities, evaluation of recent and five-year trends in migration, analysis of the spatial redistribution of the population from maps of flows. From the results obtained, it was found that in relation to the quality of the data, only the questions about geographical units that presented inconsistencies in relation to the code of the areas of the disaggregated level below the province. Recent interprovincial internal migrations have shown similar trends to five-year migrations, with the provinces of Maputo and Maputo city receiving the highest volume of immigrants, both from the South region, and Zambezia (Center) and Inhambane (South) the two with the largest volume of emigrants. In relation to international migration, there was a reduction in the volume of international immigrants, which may be associated with issues of insecurity caused by the resurgence of political-military conflict in the period 2013-2019 in the Central region of the country. Regarding return migration, whether internal or international, migrants have an age pattern similar to the classic migration curve, which reveals a greater concentration of migrants in active ages, while in relation to the level of education, migrants with a high level of schooling are the ones that migrate the least, a fact contrary to what is presented in selectivity theories.